A LITTLE MORE LIGHT 



ON 



•ANDEEW JOHNSON 



BY 



WILLIAM A. DUNNING. 




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Class. 
Book. 






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A LITTLE MORE LIGHT 



ojsr 



ANDREW JOHNSON 



BY 

WILLIAM A. DUNNING. 



[Reprinted from the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical 
Society, NoveiMber, 1905.] 



CAMBEIDGE: 
JOHN WILSON AND SON. 

Sauibcrsitg ^Drcss. 
1905. 



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A LITTLE MORP: LIGHT 

ON 

ANDREW JOHNSON. 



It was not the fate of Andrew Johnson, during his service 
as President of the United States, to enjoy an overflowing 
measure of popularity and good repute. The unfortunate 
exhibition which he made of himself at his inauguration as 
Vice-President put him under a sinister cloud whose shadow 
remained over him for some time after his accession to the 
Presidency, in the spring of 1865 ; and after February, 1866, 
the incidents of his conflict with Congress made him the object 
of more widespread hatred and more virulent vituperation 
than has been the lot, perhaps, of any other man in exalted 
public station. Between the earlier and the later seasons of 
obloquy, however, there was a period during which President 
Johnson occupied a singularly high position in general public 
esteem. During the summer and the autumn months of 1865 
the organs of popular opinion were practically unanimous in 
praise of the dignity, patriotism, and high purpose which were 
displayed in the conduct of the administration. Though doubt 
as to the wisdom of the President's policy in the South was 
deep and widespread, there was no disposition to attribute to 
him other than statesmanlike motives ; and outside of a very 
small number of vehement Radicals, a willingness to let his plan 
of Reconstruction have a fair trial was everywhere manifested. 
The good judgment displayed by Mr. Johnson and his 
advisers was an important factor in the pleasant situation in 



which the administration found itself. Of equal importance, 
however, were the peculiar conditions prevailing at the time 
in the field of party politics. The Republican party had 
practically lost its identity early in the war, and in 1864 its 
very name had been formally and officially abandoned. The 
convention that nominated Lincoln and Johnson had deliber- 
ately and ostentatiously assumed the character of a constituent 
assembly for the organization of a new party, and the name 
adopted was the Union Party. With the successful termina- 
tion of the war, however, the single purpose which liad given 
coherence to this new party had been achieved and the whole 
situation became chaotic. A revival of ante-bellum Republi- 
canism was out of the question ; for by the ratification of the 
Thirteenth Amendment during the summer and autumn of 
1865 the issue which alone had given existence and charac- 
ter to the Republican party was removed from controversy. 
What, then, was to hold together the voters who had elected 
Lincoln and Johnson ? Noticing, apparently, save the offices 
and a traditional hostility to the Democratic organization. 
But hostility to the Democracy was becoming impossible 
to those who followed the administration. The course of 
the President during the summer in reference to the South 
had brought the Democratic leaders, hesitatingly and cau- 
tiously but nevertheless certainly, to his support. A concerted 
movement had begun to rally the ante-bellum Jacksonian 
Democracy to the standard of the administration. The letter 
files of the President offer abundant evidence of the strength 
and importance of this movement. There may be read words 
of confidence and eulogy from such sturdy, if now retired, old 
war horses as Amos Kendall, Duff Green, and Francis P. 
Blair, Sr. There ma}^ be traced the process through which 
many of the War Democrats resumed their long vacant places 
in the councils of the old party and gradually moulded it to 
the support of Andrew Johnson. 

The net result of the party situation just sketched was that 
overt opposition to the administration could not be said to 
exist. Though the radical faction of the Union party were 
busily working to organize in Congress resistance to the Presi- 
dent's policy, their activity did not manifest itself openly, and 
the normal adherence to tradition and to the offices kept the 
state organizations of the party loyal to Mr. Johnson. At the 



same time the Democratic organizations also refrained from 
antagonizing him. Accordingly the President had the agree- 
able experience — probably unprecedented since nominating 
conventions developed — of receiving in a number of States 
the hearty endorsement of both parties in connection with the 
autumn State elections. 

It was while the influence of this unique situation was at its 
maximum that Mr. Johnson was called upon to prepare his 
first annual message. The reception whicli this state paper 
met with was the climax of the brief popularit}^ which it was 
his fortune to experience. The verdict of contemporaries was, 
almost without a dissenting voice, that the message was a 
model of what such a paper should be. The judgments of the 
leading New York journals are typical. The Tribune and 
Times, which, under Greeley and Raymond, were a j^^iori 
incapable of agreement on any topic, defied logic and agreed 
on this. The Times declared the views of the message to be 
" full of wisdom," and to be expressed " with great force and 
dignity." The Tribune doubted " whether any former message 
has . . . contained so much that will be generally and justly 
approved, and so little that will or should provoke dissent." 
The Evening Post found it " frank, dignified, direct, and 
manly," with not a "single ambiguous sentence." To the 
Herald also it appeared "smoothly written," "clear," and 
" frank." The Nation — and here was praise from the very 
throne itself — declared that any American might read it with 
pride, and found solid hope for democracy in the fact that such 
a document should have been produced by " this Tennesseean 
tailor, who was toiling for his daily bread in the humblest of 
employments when the chiefs of all other countries were reap- 
ing every advantage which school, college, or social position 
could furnish." 

This same tone of admiration was common to observers out- 
side of journalism. Secretary McCullough considered it " one 
of the most judicious executive papers which was ever sent to 
Congress." Charles Francis Adams, minister to Great Britain, 
thought nothing better had been produced " even when Wash- 
ington was chief and Hamilton his financier." The Johnson 
papers contain great numbers of congratulatory letters, in 
which the same tone is manifest, though these, designed for 
Johnson's own eye, need not be quoted as conclusive of their 



6 

writers' opinions. Only two of these may be referred to as 
indicating what was expected to be the effect of the message. 
George Bancroft wrote that everybody approved the message, 
and that " in less than twenty days the extreme radical oppo- 
sition will be over " ; and Oliver P. Morton assured the 
President that his policy would be endorsed by the great body 
of the people, and urged Johnson to use his patronage unspar- 
ingly to crush the congressional opposition. 

In running through the mass of comment on the message it 
is clear that the form and style attracted quite as much atten- 
tion as the substance ; and there is everywhere manifest, in 
qualified critics, a subdued amazement that Andrew Johnson 
should have produced just the sort of literature that the paper 
embodied. In the speeches and miscellaneous papers through 
which his style was known to the public, the smoothness, dig- 
nity, and elegance in expression that ran through the message 
were conspicuously absent, and there was no like dependence 
for effect on the orderl}^ marshalling of clear but moderately 
formulated thoughts. Mr. Johnson had not yet, indeed, gained 
his unpleasant notoriety as a brawler on the platform ; but 
he had a well-established reputation as a hard hitter in de- 
bate, who depended for effect on vehemence and iteration 
rather than subtlety and penetration. 

The striking incongruity between the message and Mr. 
Johnson's other papers has never caused, so far as I know, 
any well-grounded denial of authorship to the President. In 
the Washington correspondence of the New York Nation of 
December 14, 1865, it is said : — 

" Some there are who have an intimate persuasion that the entire 
message is the composition of Secretary Seward. But those who are 
nearest to the matter aver that tlie Secretary of State is only respon- 
sible for the portion relating to foreign affairs, with an occasional re- 
touching elsewhere of the expression, while President Johnson can 
claim full credit for the rest." 

Mr. Blaine, when reviewing the period, was evidently im- 
pressed by the un-Johnsonese character of the message, and 
was thus easily led to support the view mentioned by the Na- 
tion's correspondent. " The moderation in language [I quote 
Blaine's words] and the general conservatism which distin- 
guished the message were perhaps justly attributed to Mr. 



Seward." Mr. Rhodes, in his fifth volume, indicates that his 
trained critical faculty gave him very serious doubts in respect 
to this matter, but that the doubts were almost overcome. 
" If Andrew Johnson wrote it [he says] — and the weight of 
authority seems to imply that he did — it shows that he ought 
always to have addressed his countrymen in carefully pre- 
pared letters and messages." 

It is in the hope of contributing something to the elucida- 
tion of this matter of authorship that I have ventured to ask 
the attention of the Society to-day. 

Some months ago I spent a few days in looking over the 
Johnson papers, now in the Library of Congress. I had no 
particular object in view, but was on a general foraging ex- 
pedition through the material, ready for anything that might 
turn up. Least of all had I in mind the matter of the author- 
ship of Johnson's first message. While going through the files 
of letters received, my curiosity was momentarily aroused by 
a note marked "private and confidential" (one always is un- 
duly attracted by that label), and signed by a man of wide 
reputation, whose name had never, however, been prominently 
associated, so far as I knew, with the career of President 
Johnson. The note was so worded as to conceal entirely the 
matter concerning which it was written, but indicated a rela- 
tion of a very intimate nature between the writer and the 
President. I made a memorandum of the letter, with a query 
as to what it was about, and dismissed it from my mind. 

Several days later I was looking through the series of large 
envelopes containing the preparatory notes and various 
draughts of each of Johnson's messages. In most cases the 
envelope devoted to a particular message contains a consider- 
able number of more or less full draughts, in various handwrit- 
ings, of the treatment to be given to special topics, while the 
final draught of the message is in the clear, formal hand of a 
copying clerk. The annual message of 18G5, however, differs 
from all the rest. The envelope devoted to it contains noth- 
ing of consequence save a complete draught of the message, in a 
uniform hand which is not that of either Johnson or any other 
person in the executive service at the time. As I was turning 
over the pages of this manuscript and wondering with mild 
curiosity why the first message should have come down in a 
shape so different from the rest, I was joined by Mr. Worth- 



8 ' 

ington C. Ford, Chief of the Bureau of Manuscripts. All of 
us here know Ford, — how he has a sort of sixth sense by 
which he can locate, at any range less than five hundred miles, 
any manuscript important in American history, and can iden- 
tify at sight the chirography of any man who has figured in 
that history since 1492. Ford, glancing over the pages before 
me, observed in his quiet, casual way : " That looks like 
the handwriting of" so and so. I at once was struck with the 
force of the suggestion, since I had seen something of the 
writing of the person named. But what in a moment struck 
me as of particular significance was the fact that the name 
mentioned by Ford was the same name that was signed to 
the " private and confidential " letter mentioned above. Why 
this coincidence especially roused my interest will be apparent 
when the precise tenor of the letter is stated. It runs thus : 

" My task will be done to-morrow, but as no one knows what I am 
about and as I am my own secretary, I must ask a day or two more 
for a careful revision and for making a clean copy, which must be done 
with my own hand." 

Recalling this passage in the letter and my curiosity as to 
what this task might have been, I hastily looked up my notes 
to see what the date of the letter was. It proved to be Novem- 
ber 9, 1865. This was, of course, the precise time at which the 
message must have been nearing completion, for it had to be 
sent to Congress on December 5. The handwriting of the letter 
was, when compared, beyond all question the same as that of 
the manuscript draught. There is thus no room to doubt that 
the task referred to in the letter was the writing of Andrew 
Johnson's first annual message, and that the manuscript in 
the Library of Congress is the " clean cop}'^ " which the au- 
thor made about the middle of November with his " own hand." 
A collation of the manuscript with the text of the message as 
sent in was made by Mr. Ford last September, revealing that 
practically the only differences, apart from the insertion of 
the routine paragraphs summarizing the work of the various 
executive departments, were such modifications of phraseology 
as would be likely to be made by the writer himself in proof. 

That Mr. Johnson himself did not write the final draught 
of his message, is thus conclusively established. To what de- 
gree the actual writer was dependent upon the directions of 



the President — whether he was a draughtsman with full dis- 
cretion or merely a literary reviser of Johnson's own draught 
— does not appear from the evidence at hand. The age, 
learning, political experience, and literary reputation of the 
actual writer render it a priori improbable that he would have 
needed or submitted to very rigorous restriction by a man 
of Johnson's antecedents. The East Tennessee mountaineer 
whose boast that he feared no one was doubtless the truth, 
must nevertheless, under the responsibility with which his 
crude but honest nature was now burdened, have looked up 
with sincere respect and deference to a man eight years his 
senior, whose early life had been passed amid the best cultural 
influences of his native Massachusetts, whose middle life had 
found him in the high places of power and dignity of the same 
party which Johnson was serving in lower places, and whose 
declining years were being devoted to the glorification, by the 
ways of literature, research, and learning, of that people and 
that constitution which were the theme of all the President's 
declamation and the object of all his fealty. It is a priori 
improbable, I say, that Andrew Johnson exercised very close 
supervision over the construction of this message ; for the 
man who actually wrote it was no less well qualified a person 
than George Bancroft. 

That Johnson's most praised state paper was the product, 
not of his own, but of a more competent writer's pen, is from 
the standpoint of serious history an interesting rather than an 
important fact. Neither constitution, law, nor custom has ever 
required that a President of the United States should person- 
ally frame his messages to Congress or other oflficial documents, 
and it would be a safe conjecture that a relatively small pro- 
portion of such papers in our history have embodied the 
unaided labor of the men by whom they are signed. It is 
unusual, however, for a President to intrust the preparation 
of important papers to persons wholly outside the circle of his 
official advisers. Mr. Johnson's cabinet included at least two 
members, Stanton and Seward, whose qualifications for pre- 
paring the message were beyond question. If Stanton be 
considered as not available because of the indications he had 
already given of lack of sympathy with the President's policy, 
still Seward remains, — a man whose opinions, whose experi- 
ence, and whose ability made him apparently the one person 



10 

to whom resort should be made for the task in hand. It is not 
surprising tliat the widespread contemporary sentiment which 
Blaine reflected should have attributed a dominant influence 
in the message to Seward. Now that we know otherwise, now 
that we have found that a mind of totally different antecedents 
and training gave the final impress to the paper, we may pos- 
sibly get some useful sidelights on the history of the time by 
speculating on the motives which actuated the President in 
having recourse to an outsider. Thus the discovery of the 
authorship may become important as well as interesting. 

It should be understood, in the first place, that the intimate 
relations of Bancroft and Johnson are demonstrated bj^ other 
evidence than that already adduced, and that the authorship 
of the message throws an entertaining light on some of their 
later correspondence. The letter already referred to, for 
example, in which Bancroft tells Johnson that everybody 
approves the message, rings with a different tone when we 
know with what personal interest and satisfaction Bancroft 
recorded this fact. Another letter, written just before Con- 
gress met, reveals Bancroft as a diligent laborer in the cause 
of the President's policy, though in this particular case the effec- 
tiveness of his efforts was impaired by the fact that they were 
exerted upon that particularly tough subject, Charles Sumner. 
Under date of December 1, Bancroft tells Johnson that he has 
just had a two or three hours' talk with Sumner, and tried to 
calm him on the suffrage question (fancy anybody calming Sum- 
ner on the suffrage question !); that Sumner was bent on making 
some speeches in the Senate, but intended to cultivate friendly 
relations with Johnson and would call on him ; that Sumner 
agreed with Johnson on foreign relations, and that therefore 
the President might do well to conciliate the Senator by " a 
little freedom of conversation on foreign affairs." We know, 
from Pierce's memoir of Sumner, the sequel of this amiable 
attempt to make oil and water mix. The Senator called on 
the President, found him, like so many another who failed to 
be convinced of the righteousness of Sumner's views, hopelessly 
dull and wrong-headed, and left the White House to turn upon 
its occupant the turbid stream of Demosthenian and Ciceronian 
invective which had hitherto been directed at only the slave- 
holder and the rebel. 

A little later Bancroft was greatly perturbed, as well as 



11 

honored, by an invitation to deliver the oration on Lincoln 
which was to be the central feature of a memorial service of 
the two Houses. In a hasty note of January 8, he asks John- 
son concisely, "What shall I do?" Why he should have 
thought it necessary to get the President's direction, does not 
appear. We know from Gideon Welles, however, that politics 
and the tension between Radicals and Conservatives were 
operative in connection with this memorial service, and that 
Stanton, who had first been selected as orator of the day, had 
been dropped as too radical and too little in sympathy with the 
dead President's Reconstruction policy. Possibly Bancroft 
feared some scheme to compromise him with Johnson, and 
hence took the precaution of consulting the President. At all 
events, the answer must have been favorable to acceptance, 
for Bancroft did deliver the address. 

These incidents all confirm the personal intimacy between 
Bancroft and Johnson ; they do not, however, explain why 
Johnson should have intrusted the historian with a task of 
such fundamental political significance as the construction of 
the message. While we must, for such explanation, enter the 
field of conjecture rather than of history, I am disposed to 
believe that the clue is to be found in a consideration of Ban- 
croft's political past and of Johnson's projects for a political 
future. 

It is unnecessary to detain the Massachusetts Historical 
Society with a description of George Bancroft's politics. His 
early apostasy from the federalism which dominated his family, 
his college, and his whole social and literary milieu is ahnost 
what Professor Hart would call an " essential " of Massa- 
chusetts history. He was the bright particular star of the 
unspeakable Jacksonian Democracy in his native State, was 
collector of the Port of Boston under Van Buren, was Secre- 
tary of the Navy and Minister to Great Britain under Polk, 
and remained steadfast in the Democratic faith till the wartime. 
Then, in the stress of arms, he became conspicuous among 
those so-called War Democrats whose fusion with the hetero- 
geneous and ill-compacted Republican party so transformed 
it that its identity was quite lost. In behalf of the Union 
Bancroft wrote, spoke, and schemed with all the nervous and 
not always well-directed energy that was characteristic of him. 
It is a fact of some local interest in New York that his unqual- 



12 

ified devotion to the cause of the Union contributed in some 
degree to make him president of the Century Club, — - a distinc- 
tion that really distinguishes in that pHilistine town. 

This record of rock-ribbed democracy and Unionism could 
not but have been very impressive to Andrew Johnson, whose 
own record was closely parallel to it. By the autumn of 1865 
the President, as abundant evidence shows, had become defin- 
itively committed to the general policy of giving to the Union 
party, now that the distinctive object of its organization had 
been attained, a character that should perpetuate the ideals 
and traditions of the ante-bellum and anti-secession Democ- 
racy. From the Radicalism that was seeking to revolutionize 
the social and political system, he turned by the instinct of his 
nature ; from the Whiggery which might offer a refuge to 
conservatism, he turned by the habit of a life-long hostility. 
The principles and the men of the old Democratic party 
must, in his mind, now dominate the political situation. 
What were the principles of the old Democracy as they had 
been iterated and reiterated in Johnson's speeches? Govern- 
ment for and by the masses of the people ; the sanctity and 
far-reaching autonomy of the States ; the beneficence and per- 
petuity of the Union ; the supreme and divinely inspired ex- 
cellence of the Constitution ; and tlie manifest destiny of the 
United States to lead all mankind in political wisdom and in 
the ways of righteousness and enlightenment. But even as 
we read this noble and exalted if somewhat Chauvinistic list, 
does it not seem to every one who knows even superficially 
the writings of George Bancroft that we are cataloguing the 
principles and ideals which he systematically ascribed to his 
native land ? No Prussian scholar of the Bismarckian era 
was ever more certain that the goal of all history, when scien- 
tifically interpreted, was the unification of Germany under the 
Hohenzollerns, than Bancroft was that the climax of human- 
ity's political achievement was the American republic and its 
Constitution. And so we find in the message that " the hand 
of divine Providence was never more plainly visible in the af- 
fairs of men tiian in the framing and the adopting of" the 
Constitution ; that this was, " of all events in modern times, 
the most pregnant with consequences for every people of the 
earth " ; that the supreme merit of this American system is 
the guarantees it embodies of permanence to the general gov- 



13 

ernment, indestructibility to the States, and immunity to the 
citizens in all their natural rigljts. We have, in short, the 
principles for which the old Democratic party stood in its best 
estate before the war. 

To formulate these principles and to rally the people to 
them was, I believe, the purpose which Johnson had chiefly 
in mind when he confronted the preparation of his first mes- 
sage. With such a purpose presumed, the resort to Bancroft 
as draughtsman is an obvious and self-explained deduction. 
For the business in hand there was needed no old-time Whig, 
saturated with the heresies of a defunct and discredited party, 
no anti-slavery agitator, who had professed his faith in some 
law higher than the Constitution, no adept of the Radicalism 
which maintained that the inspired work of 1787 had proved 
inadequate to the exigencies of rebellion and had been super- 
seded : none of these, but one who had, through all the storm 
and stress of ante-bellum and per-bellum politics, remained 
undeviatingly true to the creed of the Democracy, — to the 
view of the Constitution which Jeffeison and jNIadison had 
maintained, and to the view of the Union which had been 
taken b}^ Jackson. 

The melancholy failure of the enterprise which was so hope- 
fully inaugurated by Bancroft's literary labor, it is no function 
of this paper to describe. We may pause merely to recall the 
fact that the labor of the historian, though so notably unsuc- 
cessful in its political results, met with an entirely adequate 
personal reward in his appointment as Minister to Berlin in 
1867. In this position he was retained by President Grant 
until 1874. To one who is aware of the feeling toward John- 
son that prevailed in the Senate in 1867 and in Grant in 1869, 
it will always be a matter of curious speculation whether Ban- 
croft would have been confirmed by the one authority or re- 
tained in office by the other if it had been known that he was 
the author of Andrew Johnson's first annual message. 



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